Not for the first time in his life, Vincent cursed himself for being so damn tall. Under normal circumstances he didn't mind so much, but when it came to slithering through air vents, he was most definitely not in his element.
This particular vent was one that led directly into the heart of Mako Reactor number four, on the south side of the city. It was cramped, it was uncomfortable and sadly it was where he was stuck for the duration. Getting into it had been easy enough, a simple matter of opening the grille in the ceiling and swinging himself inside. Once there however, he found moving difficult and turning near on impossible.
On cue, his PHS emitted a soft beeping noise. He twisted slightly onto one side, attempting to free an arm enough to bend it back towards his pocket. In doing so, his elbow came into violent contact with the metal casing.
"Shit."
After a few moments more of elaborate contortionism, he located the offending device. Reversing the awkward procedure, he finally succeeded in bringing the cell phone up to his ear to answer it.
"What?"
The voice on the other end crackled briefly with static.
"We've got a problem." Preston didn't sound unduly concerned, more irritated, so Vincent saw no reason to start worrying yet. Besides, he was experienced enough to know that on every mission, nothing went exactly as planned and you had to be willing to adapt a bit. Generally, a plan lasted until the moment you got inside the door, so he was quite pleased with this one – forty minutes had passed before the first snag had arisen. That might even be a record...
"Which is?"
"There's more of the bastards than we thought, and they're further out that expected" Preston informed him. "I've taken out two in the Ops Room, but they've already trashed most of the equipment in here. Ran a few quick checks, and aside from the reactor core, they're holding up to the fifth level. Some bugger has locked out the door mechanism as well, so they're holed up good in there." Vincent frowned. Nothing that three Turks couldn't handle, but it meant more work on their part, and that would take up valuable time…
"Right" he acknowledged. "Is Linden in position?"
"Roger that. He's stationed at the level four intersection, waiting for the off."
"And you?"
"Ops Room still."
Vincent rolled his eyes. More work on his part then. "We can override their lockout from the main Control Station. I'm closest so I'll detour. I want you and Linden to go ahead with the first phase as planned. We need to get the hostages out as soon as possible. Even if we can't get to the core yet, we can get those on the fourth out."
"Understood." The PHS blipped off, and once again Vincent went through the laborious (and painful) task of returning the blasted thing to his pocket. Taking a minute to get his bearings, he crawled off down the vent.
The call had come in earlier that afternoon. No matter what Shinra liked to think, his company's growing monopoly was not appreciated by all, and several dissident groups had sprung up of late. Many of these were instigated and funded by Shinra's principal rivals, not that they left much in the way of evidence to prove the fact. It had taken a lot of careful digging to establish the links between individuals, and even the Turks were finding it hard going to root them all out. Vincent's tag board had become increasingly complex, and reliable informants were dropping like flies. Black name labels were becoming something of a vogue.
Vincent and his colleagues had had to quell any number of uprisings over the past few months, and this seemed to be the culmination thus far. A terror group had infiltrated one of the prized Mako Reactors and shot their way through, gathering employees as hostages en route. One worker had valiantly escaped the attackers to reach a phone and raise the alarm. Once the HQ had been alerted, the Turks were dispatched immediately to deal with the situation in any way they saw fit.
There hadn't been much time to formulate a plan of attack. Preston collared a company chauffeur to drive the Turks car to the Reactor, while they sat in the back and talked strategy. An architect's sketch of the building provided them with a rough layout, which they memorised as far as was possible. Putting all his tactical knowledge to use, Vincent quickly established the best routes in, based on what the employee had relayed through over the phone before he'd been cut off. They knew roughly where the hostages were held, providing they hadn't been moved, and an estimate of the attackers and their weaponry. A lorry load of Shinra soldiers was ordered to provide a back up, but for the most part the Turks were going it alone.
oOo
The entrance to the maintenance shaft swung open, and Preston clambered inside, reaching out to pull the grille back into position behind him. Pulling out a screwdriver, he sealed the door shut once more. After all, should one of the attackers discover evidence of the Turks breaking in, then the game could be well and truly up. Bringing a mental image of the reactor plan to mind, he scurried off down the shaft. He had fared slightly better than Vincent, having been allocated a large maintenance pipe. Unlike the air vent that their leader now found himself in, these tubes had been designed to allow workers to move around the reactors and were relatively comfortable.
He was heading towards one of the Engineering Rooms, where a group of hostages were being held. The men they were dealing with were obviously not amateurs. Instead of keeping all the hostages in one place, they had divided them up amongst the attackers. The principle here was that if one group was attacked they could get word to the rest, who could then start shooting up remaining hostages. Preston had to admit it was the smart thing to do. It was certainly what the Turks would have done.
So somehow, they had to recover each group of Shinra workers without the attackers alerting anyone else. Just one terrorist could ruin the entire operation, so it was vital that things went according to plan. Preston patted his jacket pocket, just to re-assure himself that the device was still there. Just so.
He reached an intersection and headed right. Not too much further now. He flipped open his PHS and whispered into it.
"Linden, you ready?"
"And how, Preston my man." The other man's unmistakable voice fizzed back over the waves, just decipherable over the interference. Even the state of the art communication devices used by the Turks had trouble when surrounded by quite so much Mako. It was a wonder therefore that the terrorists' radios were working at all. In fact, this was what they were hoping to capitalise on.
"I'm just coming up to Engineering Three" Preston reported quietly to his colleague. He paused for a moment as he silently edged up to a vent. Peering through onto the room below, he saw a group of very scared looking Shinra employees, recognisable by their overalls. They were huddled together in a corner of the room, surrounded by masked men. The men all had guns or other weaponry. A rapid head count provided a terrorist tally. "Visual confirmation" Preston said, backing away from the grate. "We've got six men down here, and about ten hostages. I'm going to set the device off in five minutes."
Linden's chuckle was audible through the cell phone. "Hehe, then let's party."
oOo
Vincent finally emerged from his self imposed hell and into the Reactor's main Control Room. He was rather surprised that the attackers hadn't decided to hold onto the area, or even bothered to place guards. He guessed that by the time they had shepherded the workers into the core, they hadn't had time to come back up and were sitting pretty. Still, most of the other rooms they had been through had been trashed. On the course of his journey through the vent, he'd seen countless rooms where the delicate machinery had been smashed to pieces and riddled with bullets. In a way though, he considered this to be a good thing. They wouldn't have a limitless supply of ammo, and if they'd wasted precious bullets on computers then all the better.
Immediately he noticed a wall phone off the hook in the far side of the room. Walking over, he discovered that the employee who'd called Shinra had been made to pay for his bravery. A man's broken corpse was lying on the ground, partially hidden by desks. From the looks of him, he had been beaten with some kind of heavy object, possibly baseball bats, Vincent observed clinically. The attackers had been more than thorough too.
Stepping over the body, he searched the computer panels for a particular one. Locating it, he sat down at the station and quickly began typing some commands. He really would have liked Deacon to do this bit as the man was an unbelievably talented hacker, but in his absence he had to make do with his own knowledge. Thankfully Turk training covered this to a degree as well, and the security level clearance of the leader of the Turks was second to none. Instead of furtively rooting through the system, he used his personal codes to go straight in. Alright, so he was leaving a trail any halfwit geek could follow, but he was keeping his fingers crossed that the terrorists wouldn't be monitoring the computer sub-systems that heavily. And by the time they noticed anything was wrong it would be too late.
He noticed straight away that the emergency door locks to level five had been initiated. These locks were present on every floor in case of Mako leaks. Should an accident occur on one floor, then it could be sealed off while the rest were evacuated. What the terrorists had done was effectively cut the Reactor in two pieces, with themselves on the top. A bad tactical decision, in Vincent's opinion. Although this gave them control of the Reactor Core, it also severely limited their escape options.
Calling up an image of the Reactor layout on the adjacent monitor, Vincent decided on a plan of action. He activated the emergency locks on all the floors above the fifth and froze out the override using a standard Turk pass code. Should any of the other two need to access the system, they wouldn't have any trouble. Now that each batch of attackers was isolated, the three men could begin to break down the resistance.
He swiftly dialed Linden on the PHS.
"Boss?"
"Time to flush them out" Vincent said decisively. "I've shut down everything from the fifth upwards, so they can't get out. Now they're penned in and we can get right at them."
"Understood" answered Linden. "Preston is going to activate the field in about four minutes thirty."
Vincent nodded to himself. The magnetic field generator was a relatively new invention, courtesy of Weapons Development. They'd stumbled across the thing whilst researching for new methods of mass destruction. Although useless to them, the device was instantly snapped up by the Turks, who could see vast potential in it. The small generator was about the size of one of the cell phones, if a little heavier. When activated, it gave off a strong electromagnetic field, rendering the majority of electrical equipment dead for a short period of time. It didn't have a very wide range, but in the confines of a Reactor, it didn't have to. They estimated that the field would disrupt all communications equipment for about three floors, enough to stop the terrorists sounding an alarm. Of course the downside to this was that their own equipment would be immobilised at the same time.
"Then what are you hanging about for? Get your arse in gear." Vincent switched off the phone without waiting for a reply and headed out of the room. There was a larger access shaft nearby, and he had no intention of getting back into the air vent.
As he headed towards it, his phone rang again. "What this time?" he barked into it. He wedged the PHS between his shoulder and his ear while he opened the access door and started climbing in.
The voice on the end was not who he expected however.
"Valentine?" General Freeman. Vincent wondered why on earth he'd have called, especially in a situation like this. "New development. The terrorists are making ransom demands."
Vincent hooked his legs up into the rat run. "As expected, so what's the problem?"
"They're getting edgy. They know we're not just going to let them have it their own way, and they're going to start shooting soon."
"So what you're trying to say is 'get a move on'?"
The General coughed. Even he was intimidated by the leader of the Turks, and telling him to hurry up wasn't a preferred option. "Basically."
Vincent closed the grate behind him and loped off down the pipe, hunched over. Evidently the people who carried out engineering work in these things had to be about four and a half feet tall. "Then get of the damn phone and let me do my job" he snapped back. He decided that he would be better off crawling, so dropped to all fours, returning his phone to his pocket. Just as he did so, the infernal contraption rang for a third time.
"For fucks sake, can't any of you imbeciles cope for five minutes without pestering me?" he raged quietly.
The voice on the other end sounded a little taken aback, if not mildly amused. "Well" it said pointedly. "Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?"
He almost dropped the PHS. "Lucrecia?"
